The Crafter's Darkness: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 4) by Jonathan Brooks (e book reading free txt) 📕

She and her fellow Rangers weren’t about to allow them to get any farther though as 20 bows released their projectiles, many with some sort of additional elemental effect, at the initial wave of the grey armored monsters that broke through originally, her own explosive bolt slamming right into one’s forehead before exploding in spectacular fashion.  The impact and extra power was able to both shatter the bony plate protecting its brain and shove the fragments of bone inside, killing it near instantly.  The other two went down as well, their legs filled with bolts that burned, froze, poisoned, or otherwise severely damaged their limbs.

She looked over to the other side of the field and saw that the slimes were just now getting to the root spears and using their amorphous bodies to squeeze through without harm, melting the roots with their acidic nature.  However, another four of their villagers popped up onto the wall and sent out their Natural energy towards their defensive line.  The root spears regrew inside of many of the slimes trying to slide through unharmed, at least half of them piercing their vulnerable nuclei and causing them to dissolve into death.  Even with 50 of their number destroyed in that manner, many more made it through unscathed and more followed right after even as their brethren died.

She shot her next bolt joining 21 other Rangers aiming at the slimes, a normal projectile this time while she waited to use her Fire energy again.  She managed to score a lucky strike as the bolt sped into the middle of a 3-foot-wide green blob of acidic goo and pierced its fist-sized nucleus.  More than half of the others managed the same feat, though a few others had some additional effects that helped to slow them down.  One slime was half-frozen from a bit of a Water-based spell being cast on their bolt before it was shot, while another was being eaten from the inside by a dark cloud of Nether-based energy.  Neither of those would necessarily kill the slimes, but they were certainly slowed down by the effects.

She turned back to the Beasts and released another normal bolt, striking a large wolf racing ahead through the ribs but not killing it, unfortunately. She fired a second bolt which slammed into its eye and she smiled as she congratulated herself on such a perfect killing shot.  Of course, the smile went away as she turned back to the slimes, who were advancing steadily without any direct opposition, and in much greater numbers than the beasts.  If she had to guess, she would say that there were nearly 1,000 of them streaming inexorably towards their root wall, a seemingly impossible amount that frightened her a little when she stopped to think about it.

She shot her next explosive arrow at the slimes, intentionally landing it in between four of them.  When it went off, the shockwave and the heat from the explosion slammed into their forms, disrupting their stiffer outer layer, and burning their bodies with a powerful blast of fire, destroying the nuclei inside all of them.  Four down; just 996 more to go.

“Chryla, need your help!” screamed Mistal, another Ranger facing the beasts.  Her voice rang out over the root wall easily, and she immediately saw the problem.  There was a massive 40-foot-tall monster near the treeline that was starting to run towards the defensive line, and she could’ve sworn she felt the root underneath her tremor a little after each of its steps.

“We have incoming, Chryla!” shouted someone else she didn’t immediately recognize from the slime side, and the young Ranger whipped around to the other forest to see the green winged lizard-slime they had seen land earlier taking off and turning toward their direction.

Chryla was struck with indecision; her explosive bolts were in demand as heavy-hitting attacks, but she would have to concentrate on only one of the massive monsters at a time to have any chance of killing it – and that was just a chance.  None of them were Elites, and even with the advantages given to them from Sandra, they weren’t exactly equipped or trained to withstand a full-scale dungeon invasion.  They weren’t used to killing anything larger than what they normally saw throughout their local forests, and these giant monsters weren’t exactly on the list of “normal”.

Fortunately, the decision was made for her as the green-furred beast moved at least three times as fast as the slime-based winged lizard that was still rising into the sky.  The 50-foot-tall monster closed the distance to the root spears with frightening speed before it planted its feet in mid stride and pushed off of the ground, leaping at least 30 feet above the defenses and landing on top of a large wolf halfway to the root wall, crushing its back in the process.  Even though the smaller beast died, that didn’t seem to faze the gargantuan four-armed beast as it barely slowed, overtaking the other beasts around it as it raced towards her village.

There was no holding back now as she unloaded one, two, three, and then four explosive bolts with an enhancement spell on them in as many seconds, draining her reserves rapidly from the expenditure.  She wasn’t the only one that fired their explosive bolts in rapid succession, and over 50 of the bolts impacted the massive beast, staggering it from the sheer force of the explosions.  However, other than her more powerful ones that managed to hit it in its right arms – which drew a little blood and scorched the fur enough that it was black in places – none of it seemed to do much.

The most it did was stop it for a moment while it recovered from the explosive shockwaves.

This isn’t good.  Chryla glanced back at the slime side and saw that